NATO OKs Attack on Telecommunications / Plan designed to disrupt military links

William Drozdiak, Washington Post

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, May 27, 1999

1999-05-27 04:00:00 PDT Brussels -- NATO military commanders won political approval yesterday to strike at some of Yugoslavia's most sensitive sites, including the country's civilian telephone and computer networks, in a bid to cut communications between Belgrade and armed forces in Kosovo, senior NATO sources said.

At a meeting of allied ambassadors, NATO's chief military commander, General Wesley Clark, said NATO warplanes have established air supremacy and could now step up air strikes on key targets such as leadership residences, police and ministerial headquarters and the country's basic infrastructure networks.

In the past few days of NATO's 2-month-old campaign of air attacks against Yugoslavia, allied bombing runs have deprived Belgrade and other major cities of much of their electricity and water supplies by knocking out power stations.

The projected attacks on Yugoslavia's telephone system would also cause hardship for millions of civilians. But allied officials say they also will serve an important military purpose by severing land telephone connections that have been largely immune from Western surveillance.

"The plan is to cut off the main telephone system, drive their computer systems crazy and make sure the Serbs can only use cellular phones that are most vulnerable to eavesdropping by satellite," a senior alliance official said. "There is agreement (among NATO governments) that this is the moment to apply maximum pressure."

As a portent of what may soon come, allied warplanes staged the heaviest strikes of the bombing campaign yesterday, pummeling President Slobodan Milosevic's main hideout and an array of military targets that included tanks, mortar and artillery pieces across Kosovo.

In bombing raids over the past 24 hours, NATO warplanes carried out 650 sorties that included 284 bombing attacks -- a record for the air campaign. NATO's military spokesman, Major General Walter Jertz, said allied planes struck Milosevic's villa at Dobanovci, 12 miles west of Belgrade, for the fourth time in an attempt to destroy what NATO says is a command and control system based there. Milosevic's whereabouts were not known at the time of the attack.

Clark told the ambassadors good weather is expected for the next two weeks and more than 1,000 warplanes were able to conduct round- the-clock bombing runs.

"It was an impressive presentation, and Clark won strong support for his views," said a European NATO ambassador, adding that it was urgent to pressure Belgrade now. "There is a narrow time frame, maybe four to six weeks, to start moving ahead with a resettlement process that can get the (ethnic Albanian) refugees back to Kosovo before next winter."

NATO diplomats who attended yesterday's session in Brussels said Tuesday's decision to expand a potential allied peacekeeping force in Albanian and Macedonia to up to 50,000 troops was designed to coincide with what military commanders expect will be a climax to the bombing campaign that, they hope, will cause the Yugoslav 3rd Army inside Kosovo to flee or be destroyed.

British Defense Minister George Robertson announced that Britain would take the lead by sending three infantry battalions, three commando brigades and helicopter and amphibious groups -- a total of more than 12,000 troops. The new deployments will raise Britain's force in the region to about 20,000 troops.